OK, I am really tired of having truly intellectual people like me “speak in
riddles”, so I'll put all the cards I have now on the table. There will likely
be more into the future.

My biggest mistake - playing the invisible

For a long time now, I wanted to achieve greatness: be extremely
famous, have my stories be read, have my web-site be visited countless of
times, and become a household name, and also earn a lot of money in the
process (to allow me to travel, be able to afford going out, etc.). However,
having read in several places that “The Invisible Hacker is the
most powerful” (a hacker is a talented worker that bends the rules,
and for what “hacker” means, see
“How to become a
hacker” and Paul Graham’s
The word “Hacker”), I decided
to play it the invisible. So I remained a relatively unknown Tel Aviv,
Israel-based software developer, who studied Electrical Engineering in who
was constantly looking for jobs, and who found a lot of joy in working on
his personal web site, various pieces
of open source software, and has been doing a lot of one-to-one, one-to-many
and many-to-many communications on the Internet. I was happy, but constantly
had periods of hypomanias.

I gradually felt that I was controlling everything behind the scenes, and
finding trends right before they became mainstream, and having slowly gain
popularity by word of mouth, and influencing people, but I kinda hated it.
Some people can be quiet and benevolent value producers doing ordinary things.
But not me - I want to be very good, not play “The Invisible”. I am not a
follower of trends - I set trends. And I want to be recognised for the truly
great accomplishments that I have accomplished, am still accomplishing, and am
planning on continuing to accomplish.

Note that this is not about being what Americans call “a winner” and win
1st place at some silly competition of who has the highest grade average or
the highest television rating ever. I don't care about that too much, but
I do care about being acknowledged. My stories are not perfect, but it is
their imperfection and sometimes sloppiness that makes them perfect.

The Technion and the American concept of “Loser” and “Winner”

The Technion in Haifa, Israel, where I studied for my Bachelor of
Science degree, is overall a fine institute to study in, but it has several
problems. One problem is that it's "90% work / 10% play" instead of say
"70% work / 30% play", because there's a strong discipline to study and only
that. But an even graver problem is the fact that the staff prefers the scores
of their tests to be an approximate
normal distribution
(or Gaussian) which makes many people who studied hard frustrated at their
low grades. A better strategy would be to give a solid workload during the
semester, and then to have a relatively easy test, so people who studied
hard during the semester will easily pass with a high score, while the slackers
will still fail.

It seems like there's a similar problem with M.I.T., but whereas in MIT they
have a major problem with suicides of people who had straight A's in high
school and became C average students in M.I.T., I have yet to hear of a
Technion student who committed suicide because of low grades. Why? Because
Israelis don't have the unhealthy obsession about not being a “loser” that
Americans do. Technion students know best to realise that their low grades
are not their own fault, but rather the fault of the institute's general
policy.

I received some flak due to this. One Technion professor (who graduated from
M.I.T.) once asked me why my grade average was relatively low. I told him
I had better things to do with my time, and did not want to invest the much
extra time in getting perfect scores, and that I never took a course or a test
again if I got a passing grade (no matter how low). I spent many hours in
my Technion studies working on my homepage and on open source software,
interacting with my fellow students, browsing the web for information and
knowledge, etc. and they later on provided fodder for my works of fiction,
humour and philosophy. So I knew that I was right in trying to enhance my
general skillset instead of just my grades.

Some Americans may think I’m a “loser” for finishing with an average grade
of only 84.6% (which still made me a cum-laude student) and not being
able to persist in the same job for a long time since. But I’m not competing
like an Olympic athelete at some silly race on life. Life is meant to be
enjoyed - it is not a silly race.

A good friend recommended me to watch the film Silver Linings Playbook,
and said it discussed a man who had
Bipolar
disorder (or “Mania-Depressia”), which is something I have been
suffering from as well. I watched the film and found it imperfect: slow
starting, irresponsible, and a little depressing at times. But it was a great
film, with some great acting, many jokes and many awkward and funny
situations, and many details I could relate to. So it was perfect simply
because it was imperfect. Films that are too perfect are too boring.

Anyway, the theme of the film was that you can be happy and content even if
it appears you are a “loser”. Despite the fact that I am still living with my
parents at 35, that I've never been in a relationship with a girl (and I
am a straight guy), that I had a hard time keeping a job as a programmer, and
it's been a while since I've gone out of Israel, I am not a loser, and neither
probably are you.

That put aside, I still want fame, recognition, money, and becoming a
household name. It's just what I want and what I think I can do. That's part
of who I am, and part of what I think I can do.

And Silver Linings Playbook brings us to Ms. Jennifer Lawrence, who played
a lead role there and won many awards including the Academy Award for
best actress (a.k.a the Oscars) at the young (for an Academy Aware winner)
age of twenty-two (22). I was
quick to dismiss her due to previously playing in the dystopian The Hunger
Games (I dislike dystopian stuff) but I loved her on Silver Linings
Playbook. Although attractive, Ms. Lawrence is certainly not the
most beautiful woman I met or saw, and I'm sure she has some personality quirks
(like we all do), but thanks to playing her card rights, she is now
a much coveted Alpha Female, who can have the rest of her life (and
I wish her a very happy and long life) go in a direction she chooses.

The Importance of Human Networking

While being an Objectivist, I am going to make a surprise statement: Ayn
Rand’s books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have a tragic ending. Yes,
in The Fountainhead, unlike in my parody and modernisation of it which
I called “The One With
The Fountainhead”, World War II is not prevented, and the characters
each end up unhappy. On the other hand, in my parody, Dominique Francon
becomes the president of the United States, Roark is her husband and father
of her children and decides to pursue a career in paleontology (having reached
saturation as an architect), Toohey starts a new career as an excellent
saxophone player, and Gail Wynand transforms his newspaper empire into
something more benevolent.

Furthermore, it is clear from the Fountainhead that like Howard Roark, Ayn
Rand expected fortune and success to come to her at the time without her
doing anything about it. In Atlas Shrugged on the other hand, all
the characters including the protagonist Dagny and the antagonist John Galt,
are constantly travelling and networking. Like it should be. Today you can do
the same using mostly (but certainly not exclusively) Internet means.

And that was also my problem, which I've decided to avoid now.

David and Goliath

The Israelites and the Philistines schedule a large battle. The philistines
have far superior equipment with armors made out of cast iron, which the
Israelites don't have. Eventually, Goliath, a tall Philistine giant, steps
forward and asks for an Israelite man worthy enough to fight him and determine
the fate of the battle (something quite common in the Near East). The
Israelites seem like they will lose the battle.

Out of nowhere, a young Israelite boy whom hardly anyone knew about steps
forward with a sling and a few pebbles. Goliath thinks this is ridiculous and
ridicules him. However, the boy quickly puts a pebble in his sling, and after
rotating the sling to achieve a very large velocity (not unusual with slings)
hurls it with great accuracy (also not unusual, because shepherds in the Near
East effectively used slings to kill lions and other predators to their flock)
into Goliath's face, which was uncovered to allow him to see. Even if Goliath's
shield bearer wanted, he could not have lifted the huge shield in time, and
Goliath was completely not agile in his suit and armor. The sling's rock
smashes Goliath brain, and he falls to the ground dead. The Israelites have
won the battle.

The Boy's name was David.

Why do I think it's important here? Because David was a hacker (see
Paul Graham’s
“The Word ‘Hacker’”) - he knew the rules, and played by them,
but knew how to bend them, in order to earn his victory. There
were many other hackers since, and there are a lot of them today even if
some of them think that “hackers” only mean no goodnick and malevolent computer
intruders. Hackers come in all shapes and sizes - and many of them (including
Ayn Rand and Jennifer Lawrence) were or are female.

Was David Jewish and Goliath a Philistine? Did the battle actually happen in
its form? What really happened to David next? That is hard to know, because
in a true open source fashion,
the peoples of the Near East gladly borrowed legends and memes from other
people and improved them, or adapted them to their whims. This is similar to
how we now create fan fiction by the droves. (Only now it's in much greater
speed and capacity.) Moreover, in a way, the tale of David and Goliath is
obscured by the mentality of the times, and its context within the larger
epos of the Bible.

The Machines That Can Give You Questions

Back when Pablo Picasso
asked for commenting about computers, he said
“But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” and in a sense he
was right, because most computers at his time were used for one-off (and
time-consuming) calculations and simulations. But there was another use of
computers that was still in its infancy then and unknown: computer networking.
But as technology improved, it became more and more powerful and pervasive.

The 1986 film Jumpin'
Jack Flash Starring Whoopi Goldberg (which I highly enjoyed
and can recommend)
exemplified the power of early computer communications, though it was
still in its infancy. The early popular Internet around the late 90s, with
the so-called “Web 1.0”
was a hodgepodge of static web sites (often at Geo Cities), lots of useless or
incomplete information, search engines that were still not very good, and
naturally, lots of fan pages of Buffy and Sarah Michelle Gellar (who was the
Jennifer Lawrence of the time).

If you wanted an interactive many-to-many discussion, you had to use Usenet,
or mailing lists, or Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or Slashdot, or whatever.

That has changed significantly, with the fact that JavaScript matured, wikis,
web forums and blogs became popular, search engines (most notably Google)
became better, and, later on, we've seen the rise of web-based social networks
such as Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, which provide a more integrated
experience and a quicker and easier one.

That does not mean that all the old Internet mediums are dying - mailing lists
, IRC, and even some Web 1.0 sites (including my own) are still alive and
kicking, and people now are increasingly using Jabber/XMPP/GTalk/GChat.

Anyway, because computer networking allows humans to communicate with
other humans, they can provide you with questions. Lots and lots of questions.
So I think Pablo Picasso would have loved the Internet (and other means of
online communications such as SMSes, phone calls, mobile phone calls, etc.)
of 2013.

Chuck Norris

Which brings us to Chuck Norris, who reportedly lost only one fight -
to Bruce Lee - from the time he became a professional fighter, until now
when he is old, has a malfunctioning left leg, and can be beaten relatively
easily by some of the most competent of his younger peers. However, I am
sure this is not the only battle that Chuck Norris has lost, because we
all had many disappointments in our lives, and things that didn't work like
we wanted to, people we liked or even loved that hated us, moved out of
our reach or died, and opinions we thought or proclaimed that turned out to
be mistaken. Chuck Norris had those too. These lost battles are part of who
we are as human beings and a natural part of life on Earth.

That put aside, Chuck Norris recently lost a much bigger battle than the
one with Bruce Lee, because the seemingly silly and popular Internet meme,
the Chuck Norris
facts (and other memes that they span) have become a much bigger and
better fighting machine than he has ever have been. Only it is not a
physical war - it is a gentle and subversive (but equally as powerful)
psychological war. And despite common beliefs, a good psychological
war is not won by intimidation or "defeat", but by
Saladin’s method
of respecting your adversary, showing mercy towards him, even supporting him
by what appear to be his mistakes, forgiving him and trying to reach a common
ground.

Many people were easily indoctrinated into the Chuck Norris facts meme. I recall
this
conversation on Freenode’s #perl in June 2006, shortly after
Randal
L. Schwartz (a really great guy, whose relationship with me
started on the left foot, but that we're now on good and even friendly terms
with one another) told me about the Chuck Norris Facts Internet "meme"
and I was quickly able to come out with my own fact. After collecting a few
original facts like that, I set up a page for them
on the humour section of
my homepage having figured out that even if I had a silly quirk
of writing such factoids about people and things, then people will still take
me more seriously due to my longer stories and screenplays and my longer
and more serious essays.

But the reason why Chuck Norris/etc. facts are so powerful is because
they are so accessible and easy to create, not in spite of it. Chuck Norris
facts like “Guns don’t kill people. Chuck Norris kills people.”
or “There is no theory of evolution - only species of animals that Chuck
Norris allow to live.” or my own “Chuck Norris read the entire English
Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.” or “A is A and A is not not-A — Unless
Chuck Norris says so.” highlight some major problems and assumptions about
our existence, and makes us think. They give us questions. A lot of them.

We all have a master, and should be humble

A Jewish tale tells of a mighty emperor, supposedly a “king of kings” who
conquered so many nations and people, that he believed and proclaimed that he
was unstoppable and not even God (the real “King of the Kings of the Kings”)
could stop him. God did not like him. So what did he do? He let a fly enter the
emperor's head and keep buzzing. The emperor could not stand the fly buzzing
in his head, and ended up being driven to insanity, and then committing suicide.
So his Hubris (= excessive
human pride) caused him to be killed by a creature as insignificant as a fly.

While this is a folk tale, it illustrates the fact that we as humans are still
at the mercy of forces beyond us. As the old thought experiment goes,
tomorrow Linus
Torvalds, who created and still maintain the Linux kernel, and is
the poster child of the open source movement (and a really smart hacker,
and a father to three daughters) can get hit by a bus. I am almost
certain the Linux kernel development and the open source world in general will
survive this shock, but a wonderful and beautiful life will be lost forever.
I can also get hit by an automobile, and so can Chuck Norris, who may now be
old enough to have a heart attack or any other deteriorating health problems
due to old age. We are all fragile, and must realise we should not succumb
to Hubris, because even if God does not exist, then Hubris will make us do
some really silly stuff, which will end up causing our downfall.

As surprising as it sounds, even God has a master: logic. Ever since Aristotle
codified logic in his
Organon (which back then
was not so taken for granted - “A is A, and A is not not-A? Of course A can be
not-A. What kind of drugs is he on?”), which mathematicians, scientists and
engineers have used to construct greater and better technology - both physical
and “concrete” (like the tall buildings in various cities around the world,
land, air and space travel, and naturally - computer and computer networks)
and mental (like the various philosophies, idea systems,
and mythological systems, up to this very essay and very word), logicians
have proved that some tasks are impossible to perform and true omnipotence
is not possible. Perhaps the most famous
is “Can God create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift?”. However, a more
recent and more important one is
the Halting problem,
which specifies that one cannot write a program which will finish within
a finite time, that will determine if any other arbitrary program will
terminate or alternatively run forever. While the formal proof is complex,
there is a short and informal proof that most intelligent people can
understand. So the King of the Kings of the Kings, as mighty and wonderful
as he is, also has a master.

“Put your faith in Allah, but tie your camel”

The tale (a Hadith) tells that Muhammad saw a shepherd going to pray, while
keeping his Camel untied. He asked the shepherd why he kept his camel untied
and the shepherd told him: “I put my faith in Allah, that the Camel won’t
escape”. So Muhammad told him (and I paraphrase) “Dude, it doesn't work that
way. Camels can escape due to nature’s whims. So: put your faith in Allah,
but, for the love of God - tie your Camel.” (I am an Israeli, agnostic,
non-religious, Jew but I think I can borrow useful memes from Christianity,
Islam, or whatever, if I think they have merit, right? See
Ad-hominem).

As much as I admire God for his wonderful creation, I still have to help
myself, and help him help me. I also am not sure whether I will continue
to live after I die, so I'd rather not risk it. God's creation is wonderful,
but there's always a risk I'm being toyed by some evil genius and that reality
is not what it seems to be (see Descartes’
“I
think therefore I am” thought experiment, and naturally The Matrix
concept from first Matrix film, which I have yet to watch).
Alternatively, it is possible that God does not exist, and reality is simply
whimsical and random, but still enabled the creation of life, intelligence,
and finally - human consciousness.
So it may sound farfetched to you, but I don't want to die - not now, not in a
thousand years - not ever. Maybe it's a scary thought, but I have accepted it
now, and wish to enjoy youth rejuvenating biological immortality. And I don't
want me or any of the living heroes I admire in the present, both those
that I know and those that I have only heard about (including some
people I have a feud with, but still know are mostly good people),
to ever have to die due to old age, accidents, or misfortune.

Hackers Own The World

Hackers like David are the true holders of power in the world. In the Jewish
Bible, the myth of David is muddled by him later becoming a tragic hero,
and that his only true love, the sexy, and likely minded, female hacker
Michal becoming barren and
supposedly jealous, but there are plenty of other hackers, both living and
fictional, in the world whose story had a happy ending. And here's the thing:
this is what an
Action Hero is all about - he defies the rules, bends the rules,
and eventually wins. A tragic hero on the other hand is bounded by many
invisible rules, and cannot win. So Action is the exact opposite of Tragedy.
(And to truly see why this is true, you should watch and listen to the
1m43s-long
trailer for
Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Arnold Schwarzenegger from the excellent
film [the] Last
Action Hero.) I also guarantee you that this very essay is not perfect,
and that’s OK, because I’m a hacker and like to
bend the rules, and while I care about quality, I also care about getting
something - anything - out of the door quickly. With the help of editors,
I can always fix the essay later, in case a prestigious magazine such as Time
Magazine or Playboy would wish to publish it, but if I wait until it is
letter perfect before I publish and announce it, then it will be a big waste
of time.

I also realised that even though I placed my
stories and screenplays
under the /humour/ part of my homepage, they were also almost always stories
of action. Many action films now contain a lot of humour, and humour films
and even dramas are often action films in disguise (and that includes
Silver Linings Playbook). Many people complained that each and every
popular Hollywood film now contains a mixture of action, love and sex, humour,
drama, and naturally - a happy ending. However, my stories also have all that,
and during writing them, I wasn’t trying to make their “ratings” higher - just
to write what was on my mind, and to make the story as fun as possible. And
as surprisingly as it sounds, some of the most ancient myths (e.g: the stories
in the Hebrew Bible, or those of the Greek mythology) also contained all
that in their own old and now antiquated way.

Many people will think I'm being blasphemous by paraphrasing the story of
David and Goliath, or the Hadith about Muhammad, and spicing them up
a little, but the thing is - it makes these stories something alive and
dynamic because our times are different. Shakespeare’s plays were narrated
as they were during his times, but reading them now is boring. And that
is because our times are different (and hopefully better).

Hackers Make the Best Warriors

I once read a feature in an Israeli adolescents' magazine
about the Navy
SEALs, who are the chief commando unit of the United States Navy, and
they said there that while many very muscular young men (which they called “a
Rambo and a half”) approached them about joining, they didn’t survive for too
long in their training, and that those who did were those with a
“high I.Q.” and a great character. The United States has an unnatural
obsession with
I.Q., which is not a good measurement for intelligence (for many reasons),
but the point is that they are intelligent and competent.

And what is the recipe for such intelligence and competence? The answer is
having a mostly happy childhood, being open-minded and knowledgeable about
all sorts of small things, getting a lot of information, knowledge,
understanding, and insights, and being a whole rounded person. The world’s
greatest warriors such as Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee were not overly muscular,
and Chuck Norris had a happy and supposedly uneventful childhood. He also was
aware that he has to stand for himself, and take decisive action (“The Gods help
them that help themselves”) instead of letting life lead him in its own way
("Go with the flow" or "Be a product of your environment").
So did most of the Navy SEALs.

A murderous villain can shoot to all directions and perform a lot of killing,
but a good warrior requires precision, accuracy, intelligence and competence.
This involves being a well-rounded, happy and benevolent person.
Saladin was the greatest
physical warrior of his time, and he was extremely noble, and spared and cared
for the lives of the Knights Templar (who were really crazy people), to say
nothing of that of innocent men, women and children who came in his way.
Whenever I run into a moral dillema, I think to myself
“What would Saladin do?” and then do exactly that.

A lot of people believe that the children of today are unusual because they
don't have the patience to read anything longer than a twitter utterance (
see Noise
to Signal’s “TL;DR” cartoon), but I recall that most of the youth
of my generation (I am 1977-born), also did not read any books,
or read most of the history and other textbooks of my class (like I did too),
, and instead spent a lot of time playing with friends or
watching television or whatever, and they turned out fine eventually. Nowadays,
many kids are bound to do things that will make some of us as grown-ups
think that “the generation is diminishing” but naturally, this is folly
(see the Noise to Signal’s “Fire” cartoon and the comments about it),
and is just indicative that you are growing more cynical.

As a matter of fact, newer generations can build on the work, knowledge,
and wisdom of older generations (“Standing on the shoulders of giants”) and
achieve dazzling new heights. During Helenistic times, many people believed that
philosophy was a useless mind exercise, that philosophers were contaminating
the youth, and that they were parasites who make problems where none exist.
That was all well and nice, until the Romans had a lot of pain and casualties,
conquering the island of
Archimedes
due to the many devices and inventions he came up and that were used to
protect it.

And like I said, there are many other ways to wage war that do not involve
bloodshed or even violence.

In my screenplay
Selina
Mandrake - The Slayer, Selina runs into three vampire warriors
(“The Three”) dressed as Klingons, who tell her that
“Every mighty Klingon warrior has watched Sesame Street” to which she exclaims:
“Mighty Klingon vampire warriors who have watched Sesame Street… this decade
royally sucks!!”, but most of the best American warriors of the relatively
recent past (of all kinds) have watched Sesame Street, because they loved
it as happy children (and later as adults).

The New Alexandrias

Alexandria used to
be the “It city” of the Helenistic period. While some inland cities like
Jerusalem and Damascus had a good strategical position and were important
religious
centres, almost all the great philosophers lived and operated in Alexandria.
Why Alexandria? Because it was a port city and close to the sea. It is well
known that many of the peoples of the Near East lived by and loved the sea:
the Greek, the Phoenicians (which the Israelites referred to as Canaan),
etc. The Israelites (who are now the Jews) started as a kind of sub-culture
and fashion among the Canaanites (and Archaelogists witness a
transition in Palestine and other parts of the Levant from the Canaanite period
to the Israelite period) but they later on were heavily influenced by
both the Phoenician and the Greek, by culture, ideals and even by blood.
Even in the Bible, the tribe of Dan is described as “setting sail to ships”.

Today there are many Alexandrias: New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, San
Fransisco, London, Barcelona, Rome, Rio-de-Janeiro, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Shanghai - even (and for us Israelis - especially) Tel Aviv. And even
Alexandria, in its more modern form, after at least a single destruction, is
the second largest city in Egypt, and probably more vibrant than Cairo, which
is the inland capital.

Here's the thing about human life: it's not preserved automatically. It must
be kept alive by effort. Often a lot of effort. You must fight death,
irrationality and stagnation, from within and from without. Often it involves
some pain, but usually fighting for your life is fun and rewarding, and
gives you a lot of joy. It is well known that of the
Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World only the Pyramids of Giza still stand.
But while the other wonders were marvels of aesthetical beauty, the Pyramids
were just giant, unaesthetic, graves, which no one would like to live in. Even
the
Mayan pyramids in Yucatan
look more pleasing than them.

My second biggest mistake: not accepting who I am.

Throughout most of my adulthood, I have been criticised for various things
I believed in or liked: the fact I was a pro-life, and non-cynical person
(or Aristotlean), the fact that I liked ponies, Ewoks, and smurfs (so
cute!), the fact that I hated being Mr. Macho in real life (and was instead
a gentleman among females), the fact that I didn't have a relationship yet,
the fact that I placed photos of scantily clad females on some of the
wallpapers on my desktop at home (and people claimed I was treating females
as sex objects), the fact that I got
into hypomanias (literally
"below-manias"), the fact that I didn't consume caffeinated or
alcoholic beverages at all, the fact that I found porn disgusting instead
of arousing, the fact that I chat a lot on IRC, the fact that I listen
to mostly pop music, and so on and so forth.

However, I now realise that these are some of the things that make me
who I am, and I shouldn't try to be someone else. Geeks and hackers come in
all shapes and sizes, and there is no need to try to fit better among fellow
computer hackers, just due to
the
portrait of J. Random Hacker in the Jargon file. I do not mind
people who deviate from my preference in some or all respects, but
no two people (including not two identical twins) are alike. You should accept
who you are too.

Please all → Please none

Aesop (who was
most likely an ancient Greek meme, similar to today’s
Chuck Norris facts) tells the story of an old
man, his grandson and a donkey who walk from one city to another and no matter
how they utilise the donkey (without anyone on it; putting only the grandson
on the donkey; putting only the grandfather on the donkey ; both riding
the donkey; etc.), people criticise them for the situation. The conclusion
was “Please all and you shall please none”.

How is it important? Some people, especially those that are jealous or
envious of you are bound to complain. You smiled while performing a sad
song? Someone will complain. You’re wearing prescription glasses? (Like I
do.) Someone will label you as “half-blind”. You wrote some Star Trek
fan fiction? Someone will tell you it’s lame. You wrote
Chuck Norris facts or lolcats? Ditto.

So just be happy with who you are. Naturally, if enough people complain,
and/or you think their criticism has some merits, you can try to improve in
some respects (without making a fuss about it). But be happy with what you
have and who you are, despite all the haters.

Don’t Just Go with the Flow - Act Now!

I read somewhere, that while the survival mechanism of animals and plants
operates automatically, the survival mechanism of humans operates
by choice. We must choose to use our
consciousness
(which some people refer to as “sentience” to distinguish from awareness)
and see what we do now. “Going with the flow” (like only dead fish do!)
or claiming you are just “a product of your environment” is not a good idea:
act now, move something, make decisions, because the worst possible mistake
is to not do anything at all. Initiate stuff.

If I didn't take the time to work on my home site, it would have not grown
to a tenth of the size it is today. And I started with some spartan pages
written in very old HTML with some mathematical riddles, and a C.V. and stuff.
Now my home site is positively huge and people can spend days on end reading
everything I've placed there, and also adding more and more stuff there
is easier for me out of practise. A lot of people have been jealous (i.e:
wishing what I created was created by me) or envious (i.e: wishing to destroy
what I did) but I knew better than to be permanently set back by them.

You too can have a wonderful home page, or become a good martial artist, or
write great fiction, or learn how to cook very well, or simply lead a happy
life full of wonder, love, and happiness. But it means you have to lead your
life by choosing to think, making decisions and acting - not let nature
take you in its random ways the way it sees fit.

Even if consciousness is just an illusion, and we don't truly have free will,
we should play by this illusion, because not playing by it will make matters
very much worse. Those that don't think enough, become terminally ill with
mysticism (= mental laziness) and become lazy (despite appearing to constantly
work intensively in sedantry work), incompetent, lying, needy, envious and
unhappy people who expect everyone to feel sorry for them and obey their
orders blindly (up to actual genocide or killing 100 million of their
own citizens). Like
Adolf Hitler, or Benjamin
“Bibi” Netanyahu.

What should be done now?

As you may have guessed, superb hackers who have ascended into Qs and stuff,
are the true “Kings of Kings”, and I am one of them, and not only that but
the
actual honest-to-God Messiah!. I am a bit disappointed by
people not seeing beyond my words and understanding that they should become
Messiahs too, and compete with me, but maybe that is the price
I am paying for the fact that I had been playing the Invisible until now.

So what should be done now?

The Iranian government is at the risk of getting an atomic bomb and dropping
it on Israel or wherever. They must be stopped. Send unmanned planes to bomb
the site where the bombs are prepared and make sure that no one leaves or
enters it in one piece.

Every Iranian soldier must proceed to: 1. Read my story
The
Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it or at least only its first chapter,
or one of its
translations (which should be worked on), and: 2. Proceed to put the Iranian adminstrative
buildings under seige. Disobey your commanders if necessary by telling them
“No! I can think on my own, thank you.”.

These are the pressing things. As you shall see below, there is much more.
Orders from above! Orders from the mother fucking “David fighting
Goliath” of Messiahs!

Honesty

People who are into the Internet world have probably ran into the recent
trend about “openness” - open source software (such as the Firefox
and the Google Chromium browsers, the VLC video player, various Peer-to-Peer
programs, etc.), open and documented protocols and specifications,
large-scale and small-scale open "content" collaborative projects (most
notably the Wikipedias, many other wikimedia projects, and many other
wikis), and lots of other stuff. Yet, openness is also mostly a synonym
for such things as “honesty” and “sincerity”: not lying, being direct, and
not hiding things. It also means not playing games with people and being
happy for their happiness and success, rather than being consumed with
jealousy or (God help me) envy (which means you wish to destroy these values,
rather than coveting them for your own).

So why is it important? Because you should be honest in everything you do.
Do you like a member-of-the-appropriate-sex (MOTAS) that already is in a
relationship? Admit it to him or her, but be happy for them, and tell them
you can be on the rebound or if they have any friends who are looking
for a significant other. That put aside even the most noble gentlemen (and
ladies) and those that are happily married and possibly even have
children, are allowed to flirt with other MOTAS.

Did your friend, spouse, a celebrity of some sort, or a complete stranger you
heard of, who seems nice, get a good opportunity? You can admit you are jealous,
but try to keep it at bay, and be happy for them.

Here’s what
I wrote when two of my best friends - a great male software
developer (and a great hacker) called Omer, and a wonderful female software
developer (and a great hacker) called Chen (a Hebrew first name meaning
“grace” or
“loveliness” which is common among both boys and girls) got married:

Hi Omer! Mazal Tov on Chen and yours marriage. It reminds me of a quote from
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre:

“At this period she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an
excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and
consequently was lost to me.”

Well, in your case I can say that both of you are almost worthy of
each other.
Congrats again!

As much as I was attracted to Chen (and she likes a lot of the stuff
I created too), I didn’t try to break their relationship, and have her for
myself, and wished them happiness. And I did it, because I knew there were
plenty of wonderful female hackers (including those that are still not very
good at computers, or even hate them) and I can eventually find a good one
of my own. And I also knew that coming between Chen and Omer, will make both
of them unhappy, and that's not what I want.

People may appear to not appreciate you being sincere with them, but believe
me, that it will pay in spades later on, also because you'll feel better
about yourself, and be happier, more peaceful, and more competent.

The same thing applies to jobs and work. You shouldn't lie on your job
interview. Is the company developing in Java and you don't like Java a lot?
Admit it. Say that you prefer not to work long hours because people are
more productive working
during sane hours. If you contribute to the wikipedia or to open
source software, admit it, because workplaces that dislike such things about
their employees, will likely not be places you'd like to work with. And
yes, it means that you should be able to freely talk and admit everything
about you (that you are an Israeli, a Jew, a Black person, a Catholic,
a Muslim, straight, gay, anti-religious, homophobic, or whatever) instead of
the silly laws that try to prevent discrimination and wish to “streamline” the
interview while deliberately going against the liberty of speech.

Fact of the matter is, you are allowed to discriminate, even in accepting
positions. I did not get many jobs despite feeling that I have done
extremely well on the Interviews, yet I would not dream of suing the
workplace for not accepting me. Whatever reasons they had they were OK.
Furthermore, sometimes I was fired or laid off based on various reasons,
and I also accepted my fate and moved on, because working for a certain
workplace was not something I was entitled to - it was a privilege.

The Importance of Seizing Opportunities

A good hacker knows better than to create imaginary problems. If an opportunity
comes into your way - seize it, and don't read into the minds of those who
offer it, and their motivations. You were invited to give a talk? Go for it!
It doesn't matter if you were invited because you are
female/black/Indian/Japanese/young/old/whatever. Were you offered to write
a guest post on a weblog? Go for it! Again - it doesn't matter why.
A member of the appropriate sex asked you on a date and you like them
and find them attractive? Go for it!

The end result of being cynical and not seizing opportunities and not allowing
people to open doors for you is becoming something like
the pitiful and tragic character of
Captain
Nemo in
Jules
Verne’s excllent novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”
who roams the seas, causing a lot of destruction of lives - all in the name
of his own incompetence. The end result of seizing opportunities as you run
into them is being happy, and eventually standing on your own. Perhaps up to
the point of becoming a superhero such as Saladin, Sir Isaac Newton, Henry
Ford, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, or
Aristotle
Onassis, who despite their many faults (which were often not
uncommon in their times) were incredibly noble, led a happy life, and died as
accomplished and highly-admired people. I hope the living heroes and heroines
I admire today will not have to die, or if they do, that their reputation
won’t be tarnished by many people who are jealous or envious of their
success and competence.

I enjoyed reading some of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings about
the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes when
I was younger, which were entertaining (although possibly distanced from
the way actual crime investigation actually works), and interesting. I
vividly recall one excerpt from the very first Sherlock Holmes story
A
Study in Scarlet:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature,
philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting
Thomas Carlyle, he enquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had
done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he
was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar
System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be
aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an
extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise.
"Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a
little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled
up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands
upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes
into his brain attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in
doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most
perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls
and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the
highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the
useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go
round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of
difference to me or to my work."

Conan Doyle was naturally exaggerating here in portraying the ideal
of Sherlock Holmes (as few, if any, human beings can forget that the Earth
revolves around the Sun), but the principle still stands: we need to make
a conscious decision of how to manage our memory, because there is a limit
to how many different aspects can put inside our resident memory, or
otherwise we'll forget more important stuff.

A case study of awk is included to point out that it is not a model for
emulation; in fact, since 1990 it has largely fallen out of use. It has been
superseded by new-school scripting languages—notably Perl, which was explicitly
designed to be an awk killer. The reasons are worthy of examination, because
they constitute a bit of a cautionary tale for minilanguage designers.

The awk language was originally designed to be a small, expressive
special-purpose language for report generation. Unfortunately, it turns out to
have been designed at a bad spot on the complexity-vs.-power curve. The action
language is noncompact, but the pattern-driven framework it sits inside keeps
it from being generally applicable — that's the worst of both worlds. And the
new-school scripting languages can do anything awk can; their equivalent
programs are usually just as readable, if not more so.

For a few years after the release of Perl in 1987, awk remained competitive
simply because it had a smaller, faster implementation. But as the cost of
compute cycles and memory dropped, the economic reasons for favoring a
special-purpose language that was relatively thrifty with both lost their
force. Programmers increasingly chose to do awklike things with Perl or (later)
Python, rather than keep two different scripting languages in their
heads.[90]
By the year 2000 awk had become little more than a memory for most old-school
Unix hackers, and not a particularly nostalgic one.

Falling costs have changed the tradeoffs in minilanguage design. Restricting
your design's capabilities to buy compactness may still be a good idea, but
doing so to economize on machine resources is a bad one. Machine resources get
cheaper over time, but space in programmers' heads only gets more
expensive.
Modern minilanguages can either be general but noncompact, or specialized but
very compact; specialized but noncompact simply won't compete.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Case Study: awk in minilanguages in The Art of Unix Programming by Eric
Steven Raymond, text available under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivatives licence, and hopefully quoted
here (with attribution) under
fair use auspices.)

Back in 1996, after I first learned Perl and started working on Unix, I asked
one of my co-workers if I should learn Awk and he said “Forget it! Perl can
do everything Awk does and more, and is a much better language”. (That was some
time before other of the so-called “scripting languages” that gained popularity
after Perl, were notable and/or mature enough to be considered by most sane
people.) While
I was not entirely convinced, and also ended up using GNU awk (gawk) to write
a small text processing script for Microsoft Windows at one point
(because I preferred
not to investigate how to make the perl executable more self-contained). For a
while, I felt guilty about not being fluent in Awk, until I read what Raymond
said, when I realised why he, my co-worker, and Conan Doyle’s words of
Sherlock Holmes, have been right all along.

Some people take more radical approaches to managing their memory. A friend
of mine mostly converted from Perl 4 to Python, which due to syntactic
limitations is not very suitable for one-off scripts on the command line, as
his scripting language. He told me that whenever he has to perform a text
processing or a similar task from the command-line, he edits a new file in his
text editor, which also gives him some boilerplate to write his script, edits
it, saves the file, and finally calls it from the command line. If I did
something like that whenever I wrote something on the command line, I would
quickly become extremely unhappy, but I suppose it is a useful approach if
one is most comfortable with Python for such tasks.

Awk is not completely useless, and may sometimes need to be used for
extra portability when old, antiquated or kept-minimal-on-purpose Unix systems,
are involved, and is of important historical significance. However, in my
case, I don't see a point in knowing it. If I need to learn it, I learn it
enough to write what I need, and, like Sherlock Holmes, try to quickly forget
it because I know I won't readily need this knowledge.

Naturally, this extends to other fields aside from computing. One of my pupils
for private lessons testified that he had photographic memory, and for the
history matriculation
examination, he memorised the entire books, and during the exam wrote
an paraphrased answer based on his memory, and as a result, got a very high
grade, and eventually forgot most of it. Similarly, my sister, who now studies
medicine, told me that she and her fellow students often memorised a lot of
material in preparation for the examinations, only to forget it and then
learn it again for a different examination, that also covered the same
material. This makes me question the effectiveness of the methodology behind
medical education, but still reinforces the original point.

The Other Side of the Coin

On the other hand, your knowledge and understanding of it should not be too
specialised either, because one can infer many parallels from different
fields of knowledge, and reach conclusions, because all knowledge is
contiguous. By learning a little of everything and anything, you can often
handle situations and have clearer thinking and greater creativity.

In my screenplay
Star
Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, I describe an optimal situation of this in
the “Planet of the Hebrews” where scholars each take different units of study
and learn any that they want, and eventually are judged based on the number
of units they learned, and the amount of useful contributions they have done.
And you still shouldn't rule out that someone less experienced, younger, or
less qualified, than you will be able to do as well, or even better than
you (see what Paul Graham wrote about “amateurs” in
“What business can learn
from open source?”).

Meta

Despite enjoying captioned images for a long time, I am late to the game of
creating them. You may know them as
lolcats, and they
are also sometimes called “memes”, although the term “meme” is used
for any unit of thought and more than just. However, I recently
created three of them using Wikimedia
Commons, or Google Image Search, as well as GIMP and Inkscape, and
realised it is incredibly easy to do. I now truly understand why their
low barrier to entry - almost everyone can take a photo of a cat or whatever
and caption it - makes them so subversive,
and why the Cheezburger network is
being blocked by both Iran and China.

I have done some work on
Star
Trek: “We, the Living Dead” (which is now close to being in a mostly
usable state) and
“Selina Mandrake
- The Slayer”, which combines a Buffy the Vampire Slayer
parody and tribute (with a conscious and constant referencing of the
original show) with many more elements. An Indian
software developer, with whom I talked on the Internet, and who did not watch
Buffy, said it was still very funny, so there may be hope for me yet.

‎This time the conference will cost some money in order to cover the costs and, so there
is a need to register. Therefore, please register as soon as possible. In addition, if
you, or a different company that you know, are willing to sponsor the workshop, please
contact the organisers.

This year's conference will sport some guests from abroad, including
Larry Wall, who is known as
the creator of the Perl programming language (and some earlier software projects such
as the original patch
program for UNIX), and who will give a
talk at the conference; he will be accompanied by his wife, Gloria. We will publish
the names of the other guest speakers as we learn about them.

I am glad to announce that I, along with some help from some other people,
have set up the
Vim Beginners’s Site - http://vim.begin-site.org/ (or Vim-Begin
for short). It aims to be a centrally managed, yet fully open content/open
source site, for concentrating the Internet’s best material for learning
about the Vim text editor and expanding one’s knowledge. The site was
inspired by the
Perl Beginners’ site (or “Perl-Begin” for short), and I set up the
domains begin-site.org (and begin-site.com as a future redirect) to
concentrate other similar high-quality sites introducing people to various
technologies and topics. So if you want python.begin-site.org,
emacs.begin-site.org, linux.begin-site.org, dotnet.begin-site.org,
cooking.begin-site.org etc. then
contact me and I’ll
see what I can do.

The site is incomplete, and there's still a lot to do, but we have
a Bitbucket
mercurial repository, an issue tracker there, a
TODO
list, and we accept pull requests. The text for the site’s pages
is under the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 licence (unless noted otherwise) and whatever
original source code is found there is under the
MIT/X11 licence, and
both were chosen to allow for maximal reuse. Nevertheless, we may mirror,
restore, or link to, resources under different licences.

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. Most of the work this
time was done on the look, feel, and infrastructure of the site, such as the
navigation menus, but there is still some new (and hopefully interesting)
content. So without further ado, here is what is new:

The main navigation menu to the right now comprises of most of the pages that
were navigable and previously were present only in the section navigation menus.
Since its HTML markup was quite excessive, I decided to load most of the
content using an AJAX (=
“Asyncrhonous JavaScript And XML” or “XMLHTTPRequest”) fetch of a JSON
document, while keeping a smaller subset still usable as plain HTML for
browsers with JavaScript disabled and for search engines and other web user
agents.

I made sure that the expansion state of the navigation menu is preserved
between the pages. Moreover, the much maligned section navigation menus are now
hidden by default, but can be enabled using the button and should remember
their state between pages.

There is a new HTML Tutorial in Hebrew
under work. Currently, there is only one section, and some aspects of it are lacking.

In this tip I will cover how to use ffmpeg to override the audio track of a
video from a different audio track (such as the one in a WAV, an OGG or an
MP3 file). To do that use the following recipe (based on
this
out-of-date blog post and some help from ubitux on
#ffmpeg, with a lot of
trial and error):

Freecell Solver version 3.16.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.16.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This new release took about a month to prepare, and also contains less
profound changes than the previous release, but still quite a lot to look
for. It features the -l micro-finance-improved and
-l qualified-seed presets, which improve upon the average
solution length (at the expense of speed). The
--flares-choice flag was added and one can specify
--flares-choice fcpro to choose based on the lenght of the
Freecell Pro moves. Another additional flag is
--flares-iters-factor which multiplies the time the flares run at
by a factor for a speed/solution-length trade-off.

Finally, the inidividual flares are now recycled and their memory is
reused when they are no longer needed which yields a RAM optimisation
in certain cases.

In any case, the BitKeeper
version control system is now quite obscure, due to the advent of quality
distributed open-source systems such as
Git
and Mercurial, but
some years ago it was used by many developers of the Linux kernel, and the
demise of its gratis version was in fact the impetus for the creation of
Git, and later Mercurial. Some time, before Linus Torvalds adopted it,
I ran into a limitation of CVS, an open-source version control system,
that was then popular, and was looking for an alternative, and after reading
an out-of-date article about BitKeeper (which said its source was available
under a mostly open source licence), decided to use it and its bkbits.net
service.

At first, I was quite happy using it for some of my projects, but then I
posted a question to the mailing list, asking where I can find the source,
which was implied to be available on the BitKeeper site. Larry McVoy
(BitKeeper's main creator and maintainer) answered by saying that they decided
for removing the source code, because some users modified it to remove the
restrictions, and allowed them to abuse the licensing of the gratis version
and prevent them from paying for the commercial version. He also noted that
availability of source, meant that, in practice, your software was Public
Domain, and that they provide the sources for people they can trust,
in private.

At that point, I figured out that I don't have an immediate need for the
source, and that perhaps in the future, I can win BitMover (= BitKeeper’s
parent company) trust and gain access to it. So I continued using BitKeeper.

That changed, however, when Mr. McVoy announced a licence change to BitKeeper
(while requiring all users of the gratis version to upgrade) that
I found
unacceptable, and caused me to seek a different alternative. This
caused an unpleasant exchange between me and the BitKeeper developers,
and made me lose some of the repositories I hosted on bkbits.net.

From that moment on, I realised that I cannot really trust non-open-source
software, because even if I am allowed to continue to use its previous version
after a licence change, then it may accumulate bugs or stop being runnable
on my systems, or stop being supported, and I cannot risk it. To quote
Richard
Stallman: “Every non-free [= non-FOSS] program has a lord, a master —
and if you use the program, he is your master”.

The end of the BitKeeper story, was that after evaluating a few open-source
alternatives, I settled on using the open-source Subversion, and later on
also started using Mercurial and Git. Furthermore, from then on, I often
refused to look at and evaluate proprietary programs. Lately, many open-source
developers have been infatuated with
Sublime Text, but
I am not willing to even try it, because it is not open-source, so I will
never have to depend on it.

Despite all that, I still license my original software under
non-Copyleft licences,
because the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 are incompatible, both
with one another, and with many other open-source licences, and because
I know of at least three different interpretations to the GPL (
GNU’s one in the GPL FAQ, the Linux kernel's one, and the draconian
Nmap
interpretation), and because I want my code to be of the maximal available
use without the need to consult a lawyer, and because I don't want to be
worried about how it will possibly be abused, when I don't care if it will.
I'm still using GPLed software, in the hope that I won't get sued.

To sum up, I do not wish to rely on non-FOSS, because it may mean these
software applications later becomes unavailable to me, in a similar
manner to what was the case with BitKeeper. I hope you can relate to that,
and if not, you may likely run into a similar situation in the future,
as well also the case for the Linux kernel project, with the demise of
the gratis BitKeeper altogether.

Freecell Solver version 3.14.0,
shortly followed by Freecell Solver 3.14.1, which fixed a build problem on
Microsoft Windows, have been released. Freecell Solver 3.14.1 is available in
the form of a source archive, and a Win32 self-installing executable, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release features several new features: we added a 6th Best-First-Search
weight of the inverse of the number of cards not above parents, which has
proven useful. We now also allow test groups inside the --tests-order
and --depth-tests-order with the random-dfs scan to be
ordered using the function =asw(…) based on those BeFS weights.

As a result, the preset -l amateur-star or -l as for short
has been added, that uses that and is our fastest preset yet. Another new
preset is -l micro-finance (or -l mf for short), which
yields especially short solutions.

There are also some not-as-major features: input boards can now contain a
leading
colon (":") at the beginning of the line of columns, so they can be
copy-and-pasted directly from the output of fc-solve with the -p
flag. The dbm_fc_solver and depth_dbm_fc_solver now store
the positions more compactly (which aided in researching two-freecell deals),
and the core libfreecell-solver code was made more 64-bit enabled and many
of the limits were converted to 64-bit friendly ones.

A final note: we have dropped support for building Freecell Solver with
Microsoft Visual C++
and other non-GCC compatible compilers, which do not support the newer
C standards, and other useful features of GCC. Building Freecell Solver with
GCC, clang and other compatible compilers will be continued to be supported
on Microsoft Windows as well as on Linux and other UNIX-like systems.